In April and May of 2010, contemporary artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin mounted a show at the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo entitled "Special Exhumation of the Egyptian Surrealist Movement." There, they displayed fragments - artfully recomposed for the gallery space - from what in the 1940s had been a politicized artistic movement devoted to circumventing oppression. They also pasted posters of 'Egyptian Surrealists' aphorisms up over downtown Cairo, all of which were torn down in the middle of the night. As a result of these artists' intervention, the art scene in Cairo and beyond became newly abuzz with talk about a moment that had until then lain sleeping, silently entombed in historical surveys and art school textbooks.

What do we make of this type of renewed consciousness? My talk at Darat al Funun aims to take up and extend the challenge of understanding surrealism in the Arab world anew, as something significant for the contemporary moment. I will review the two artists' "exhumation," then continue on to show some of the other artists from the Arab world that have claimed the category Surrealist, or depoyed surrealist tactics toward entirely other aims. Artists discussed will include: Georges Henein, Ramsis Younan, Abdel Hadi Al-Gazzar, Fateh al Moudarres, Robert Malky, and Hamdi Attia (specifically the paradoxical elements within his Archipelago - A World Map II currently on view at Darat al Funun). Finally, a key question I hope we will debate in the Q&A is just how possible or desirable it is to reclaim the idea of an artistic movement ("surrealism") as something emancipatory without suggesting that is practicioners ("surrealists") are subordinate to a historical movement which originated, and died, in Europe.